The Boston Herald announced that Fenway Park is installing a kosher hot dog vending machine:

The home of the Fenway Frank, which claims to sell more hot dogs than any other ballpark in the country, is adding a new option for Jewish fans who adhere to strict kosher dietary laws. A new automated “Hot Nosh” vending machine, to be located in the big concourse under the bleachers, will cook and dispense all-beef, glatt kosher hot dogs in under a minute.

That’s cool at the ballpark, but how about in a Jewish day school?

Feder first eyed Kosher Vending Industries because his children’s Jewish day school, the Maimonides School in Brookline, lacked a hot lunch program. After Passover, the school will roll out another Hot Nosh machine that cooks and dispenses kosher pizza, mozzarella sticks, vegetable cutlets, onion rings and potato knishes.

Um, are there any Jewish foods - vendable! - which aren’t fried and unhealthy? And since when did mozzarella sticks and onion rings make it into the “Jewish” cultural food category?

Plus, there’s more Jewish weiners (and thus a few more Weiners) in the ballpark pews these days.

Thanks to Rhea Kennedy of the You are Delicious blog, for this guest post.

When I was a kid, my parents gave me weird food for lunch and packed it in weird ways. God bless them, they sent me off into the world with chunks of tempeh, entire raw portabellas, dark whole-grain bread with thick pieces of cheese inside. These treats were invariably wrapped in waxed paper, which my mother had deemed better for you than plastic baggies or packaging from a factory. As soon as I was old enough to notice this was different from the other kids’ cold cut sandwiches in neat Ziploc bags and individually-wrapped string cheeses, I became mortified.

Around the same time, I started attending Hebrew school in the evenings – something I approached mostly with dedication, although I occasionally dragged my feet about going. After all, it wasn’t the Christian kids’ religion class (which we all just referred to as Religion) that got them out of school early once a week. To me, those who went to Religion sat in the soft cloak of normalcy—and I didn’t.

Fast forward a few years.  I now follow Jewish tradition with pleasure and am a zealous whole foods foodie. Although eating and religious study practices may be hard to take for an image-conscious little kid, I now understand eating whole foods, keeping kosher, saying brachot and other thoughtful ways of approaching food are central to my life.  Indeed, I’d argue that observing these traditions - in combination - is rather revolutionary.

Read more »

For three months I’ve been enjoying my new kitchen in deeply gratifying ways. It transformed my Thanksgiving experience (referred to as “The Super Bowl of cooking”) due to my increased refrigerator, freezer, countertop, cooktop and oven capacities. The new island configuration without the previous wall completely transforms my interactions with my children, family and guests.

I still bake challah every week, but now I have more refrigerator space for the dough to rise Thursday night. I tried baking the loaves in my new steam oven last week and they were extra moist. Next week I’ll try using the oven’s thermometer probe on the challah. Confessions of a kitchen geek. The kitchen was always the hub, but now it is open and accessible, and I reside in it with tremendous gratitude.

Today’s Harold McGee article on heat in the NYTimes provided me with a new level of validation.

Read more »

No, it’s not a joke:

The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe.

Does this give anyone else the sense of peace and hope for the world that it gave me?

The wonderful Tuv Ha’Aretz Community-Supported Agriculture group at the JCC Houston came up with this Top-10 list of must have items in order to maximize the produce from your CSA share.  Turns out, the list is pretty handy for any Jewish food enthusiast (or even the occasional ”reluctant” foodie).

Didn’t think an ice cube tray was a fundamental part of using your CSA share?  Think again!

Check out the full list here.  And if you have any helpful kitchen doo-dads that you think should be on the list, leave a comment below! 

Last week, my coworker Judith came into the office, excited about a seasonal food discovery she’d made.  “I was trying to figure out what to do with all the potatoes I got in my CSA,” she said.  “And I realized - December’s not that far away and potatoes store well…no wonder latkes are a traditional Chanukah food!”

Judith’s epiphany links her back to the kitchens of our collective Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors, who made food from inexpensive, readily-available ingredients.  What better way to have a delicious, filling meal, than to fry up a bunch of winter root veggies like potatoes? 

And, I thought with a swell of “it all makes sense!” elation, what better to top them with than a sauce made of the only fruit that stores as well as potatoes in the winter - apples!  Remembering the Hebrew connection put me in even more in a tizzy.  (One of the first things that every Hebrew school student learns is that tapuach means apple and tapuach adamah means “apple of the earth” - potato.)

It was high time, I thought, to make some applesauce.  (Recipe below the jump…)

Read more »

It’s a familiar legend - whether it’s the Golem or Dr. Frankenstein’s monster (the latter perhaps inspired by tales of the former) - what we arrogantly create comes back to haunt us. America’s monster might turn out to be one that we encounter in its most powerful form each Halloween: corn. Not the sweet, buttery kind that we get from our CSA in July. The kind that industrial-strength petro-chemicals and lobbyist-induced grain subsidies have produced in quantities unfathomable even fifty years ago. As Michael Pollan noted in Omnivore’s dilemma, which so eloquently sounded the clarion call for the dangers of corn, much of this crop has been turned into food additives that are so commonplace that if we’re eating any type of processed food, chances are we’re eating corn, even if we don’t even know it! Read more »

Organic. Pancakes. In a can.

End of civilization? Or dawn of a new era of enlightened convenience foods?

Discuss.

As Ben, Aaron, and other The Jew & The Carrot bloggers have mentioned in previous posts, this country’s obsession with bottled water has reached epi(demi)c proportions.  We spend 10.8 billion dollars/year on bottled water (and growing), while people in many US cities could enjoy water straight from the tap.  Our addiction adds up - in dollars, in packaging going to the landfill, and in CO2 (from importing water to the US from far off places like Fiji.)

I’m personally ready to put a cap on my own bottled water consumption - give me a Britta and a good looking Nalgene and I’ll get along just fine.  I’m not, however, ready to let go of seltzer water - that “traditional Jewish” bubbly beverage that just feels a little more exciting than its non-carbonated cousin.  Luckily, I just found out about a company called Fountain Jet that offers a “Home Soda Maker” - that promises as little or as much seltzer as you want “with the push of a button.”  I know I sound like an informercial, but I’m pretty excited to think that I could make all my own seltzer for the Rosh Hashanah table and not have a pile of plastic messing up the kitchen afterwards. 

Check out Fountain Jet here.

I’m re-doing my 1985 vintage kitchen. A few months ago I ripped the handle off an oven, four burners have never been enough, and the ancient dishwasher is so loud it sounds like a street-cleaning machine. The cabinet veneer is peeling. The wimpy double ovens are horribly slow, poorly callibrated, and situated in a doorway making me turn sidways everytime I try to access them. (Forget about induction — that came much later). I could go on. Take, for example, the white tile floor. Anybody tried to keep a white tile floor clean in a heavily trafficked kitchen? It’s hopeless, and I can’t take it anymore.

Read more »

The coolest home science experiment ever — no, really EVER — is the home cheesemaking kit. I am just dumbstruck at how nifty this is: A gallon of warm milk, citric acid, a rennet tablet (OU hecshered vegetarian rennet, actually) and poof! Cheese. Stringy gooey mozzarella. Or milky, creamy ricotta.

And it’s so ludicrously easy: perfect for kids since nothing gets warmer than tepid bathwater. They get to stretch and pull the mozzarella to make bocconcini or string cheese. It’s so much fun to play with your food. Milk magic in your kitchen.

Read more »

Idea and image courtesy of flickr user Rodrigo Piwonka.

Jews have always been good at “repurposing” - pagan agricultural festivals, indigenous artforms, or the latest technology are all fodder for making our Jewish lives richer, more varied, or, well, simply more portable.

(Note: Even “Food-safe” plastics raise multiple health issues. You probably wouldn’t want to make a habit out of carting your lunch around in a container that you got of the shelf at Staples. Still, an entertaining idea nonetheless).

The New Jersey Jewish Standard reports:

This month, [Kosher Vending Industries] will unveil 25 machines serving kosher dairy items for a trial run. The first machines will serve pizza, mozzarella sticks, onion rings, vegetable cutlets, potato knishes, and French fries, at a cost of $3 to $4 per item. The food, all certified by the Kof-K, will come frozen from various suppliers and Kosher Vending will repackage it for its machines. Eventually, Cohnen would like to expand to separate meat machines.

We’ve had our rants about whether one more unenlightened, processed kosher food option actually amounts to a good thing, but not so much has been said about gadgets in general — automats are really cool.

Too bad so many of the options are so bad for you.

“They think we’re going to be bigger than Kraft because of our niche market,” he said.

Dream big, guys.

Read more »